Lolita: why this 'vivid, illicit' portrait of a pervert matters at a time of endless commodification of young girls
In his afterword “On a Book Entitled Lolita”, Vladimir Nabokov never mentions the word paedophile.
- In his afterword “On a Book Entitled Lolita”, Vladimir Nabokov never mentions the word paedophile.
- In his mind, Lolita is not about a man sexually and mentally abusing a 12-year-old girl.
- Which is about as damning an assessment of a culture as you’re ever going to get.
- Nabokov explains that having “invented” Europe and his native Russia in many critically acclaimed books, he turned an outsider’s eye on the Land of the Free.
- The recognition of what he was able to conjure on the page ignited a wholly different sense of shock and awe.
The problem with censorship
- Reconsidering Lolita in the 21st century raises interesting questions about the relation of literature to censorship, book banning, and the contemporary equivalent of expressive erasure, cancel culture.
- It was also banned as obscene for periods of time in France, England, New Zealand, Canada, Argentina and South Africa.
- Nation states don’t censor as much as they used to, if at all, but the machinations of censorship continue in arbitrary ways.
- This deliberate erasure of queer voices and stories highlights the problem with censorship of any kind.
- Which books get to go through to the keeper cannot depend on who is drawing the lines in the sand, yet this is ultimately how all censorship works.
The afterlife of Lolita
- In 2021, Jenny Minton Quigley, the daughter of Walter J. Minton, who first published Lolita in America in 1958, edited a collection of essays titled Lolita in the Afterlife.
- A fierce advocate of unfiltered artistic expression, just as her father had been, Quigley grew up in “the house that Lolita built”.
- She wanted to test the enduring power of Lolita in the glare of the #MeToo movement and the fraught political climate of Trump’s America.
- In Lolita in the Afterlife, Nabokov is critiqued and celebrated.
- What emerges in Lolita in the Afterlife is a recognition that outrage misdirected at the book or the writer does nothing to negate the realities aligned to it.